KBattleship is a TCP/IP-based boardgame similar to the common game played on a sheet of paper, where two players try to battle the other's fleet. KBattleship has just been moved into the KDE Games package and will be publicly available with the KDE 2.2 release. For the moment, you can only get it via APPS.KDE.com, anonymous CVS, CVSup, or a recent kdegames snapshot. Check it out!

I was speaking more about TrollTech, if the KDE developers were to fork Qt and do a CORBA binding then they could clean up all the hacky stuff to get around MSVC's crappy compiler, fix the language bindings problem and end the liscencing problems with Qt. Do you realize how many KDE developers are working for TrollTech, because of that the direction of KDE is realy controled alot by TrollTech(Lotta developers on one thing and you have the network effect).

What licensing problem are you talking about. Qt is GPLed. For the few people who still have problems with that I can only say that even RMS agreed that Qt has no licensing problem anymore.
And what the core KDE developers that work for TT are concerned, there are a some, but it is not even the majority of the KDE developers. In contrast to that even Alan Cox recently posted in a (Gnome developer) newsgroup that there has been hardly any contribution to Gnome outside of Ximian/Eazel and that he is concerned that they basically took over the project.
Generally I have no problem with that, but the irony is that Gnome was started in order to prevent the "evil" commercial influence of KDE on free software and now it seems that KDE is more in the spirit of free software than Gnome is.

I did not mean legal problems with liscencing, where I work we don't GPL our software, and I garauntee you that we aren't going to pay 2000$ a developer for a toolkit when there a toolkits just as good for free, forking Qt means that TT's Qt would probably be incompatible.

> Yeah, you're right. We should all like the Kompany better because their budget is small

Actually I'm going to guess you have not been exposed to much business, expecially the school of hard knocks. I'll make this very simple but quoting a proverb. "The borrower is the lender's slave". If one wishes to make an honest evaluation it seems you would have to be utterly naive or totally dishonest not to recognize that theKompany's less glamorous budget gives them an advantage of not having to feed an 800 pound gorilla. To quote more wise words to business people "If your income does not exceed your outgo then your upkeep will be your downfall".

Now, I have yet to hear anyone who's savvy I respect give me an explanation of what is rational in the Eazel and Ximian business plan. However given the old rule that 1 in 6 ventures returns a yield I guess some people are looking at tax write offs already.

> and because they're jealous of all the attention Gnome is getting. Oh, whoops! Did I say that?

Yes, but that is alright. While I respect the GNOME core developers I have found their advocates to not be able to make a better argument than this for their opinions. I'm sorry... Shawn Gordon does not strike me as being jealous, let alone having time for such pettiness... and unlike Eazel and Ximian I can pencil out his business plan.

> No one is "destroying" Gnome. Point out just ONE thing that Ximian or Eazel have done to "wreck" Gnome.

I'm going to agree and disagree. Those are too strong of words, but there is little doubt that some of the lustre has been taken off. Eazel is a good example since they are openly risking their continued development by entering business without a real business plan. Spare me the sound bite GPL argument. In the first place that is LGPL which means that new features can be charged for to pacify investors. But the reality is that if they should cease to exist there appears to have been 35 programmers on the payroll for over a year to get to a nowhere near finished product. There is no way this does not add up to major slow downs in development should it come to pass. Source code is one thing... 70,000+ hours of development time to replace is another.

> And thanks to the license you apparently scorn, if I don't like what Eazel or Ximian does, I can fork the code and do whatever I like with it.

Who's scorning the licence? Anyway, I am 110% percent behind you forking the code or at least fishing through it trying to figure out what they hell went on. I am guessing there must be a fair pile of it so by the time you have sorted through and are ready to fork we should have had months of peace.

> but what's the point of talking about how sh*tty the one you're not using is. I love Gnome, but I know KDE has some VERY cool features. I simply don't choose to use it - I prefer Gnome.

Well again I agree and disagree. I know there is plenty of activity outside these companies (even though I think they both smell since I see no viable business plans). I also agree that there is no point in knocking them... however I'd like to point out that this site for KDE. People need a place to let their hair down a little and say what they are tired of getting flamed for... even if it really is not the best. The point is... if you don't use KDE... why are you reading the KDE news? Why are you trolling? I have to tell you... I don't use much GNOME, but I do not dislike it so that I look for GNOME news sites to make snide remarks on. It seems pretty petty that you are trying to open a GNOME formum on a KDE site.

The GNOME advocate was being a wee bit defensive and angry. This is true. It's a fine line between that stance and trolling, and perhaps he crossed it. However, both the GNOME news site (which, BTW, has a lot of KDE trolls posting on it) and this site are open. If people here want to knock GNOME, they should be open to GNOME people responding. This same is true at the GNOME site. Honestly, though, all this trolling does no one any good whatsoever. It doesn't help KDE; it doesn't help GNOME (well, maybe it helps Microsoft ;-). Constructive criticism is good. Trolling is just a waste of chars. Peace.

How about a game server that can be EASILY programmed (perhaps Graphically). Imagine a server using Mercury (Compiled Functional/Logic language) as a game server. Also, imagine a nice client board with drop in pieces that can be coded easily, perhaps in C++/Python.

Why use Mercury for games? Board games are nothing but rules/logic. Mercury was built for this and can be much faster than Python and flexible compared to C++/Java (As it relates to logic/inferences).

While I like the games, it would be nice to see a gameing system that individuals can build/design. If I might point out, Hasbro/Parker Bros might get interested in this, in that it will allow games to be test marketed. Capsi, I might point out that your kmonop could be extended to do just this.

I can't get Kbattleship to compile on Linux Mandrake 8.0 Beta 3. It keeps looking for libXext (I've found it in /usr/X11R6/lib) but ./compile never sees it. I let compile know where my x includes and libs are.